November 2014

As a web designer or web developer, you don’t have to make everything right from scratch, sometimes a few freebies and valid pieces of code can help you a lot! The web developing community has increased over the years and there are many great websites which offer valuable freebies for you to use in your own projects.

To help you out, we selected over 450+ free and premium CSS layouts for web developers. These free and premium CSS layouts will not only help you design better and save time, but will also provide you with valuable new information and techniques you can learn!

There are many traditions we follow at Christmas time. Giving presents to friends and family, decorating the Christmas tree, preparing a huge turkey dinner, over-indulging on egg-nog, and perhaps one of the oldest traditions of all is sending out seasonal greeting cards to all of our loved ones.

All of those traditions are pretty much unbreakable and set in stone. Except the last one I mentioned. Year after year we send out millions upon millions of greeting cards, but why do we do this when we could just as easily take advantage of all of the digital tools we currently have at our disposal, like After Effects and email, and instantly send a video greeting card instead?

Seasonal video cards are much more fun, they’re more personal, and they’re also surprisingly easy to create, as the below examples will illustrate.

Our annual tradition continues where we finish up the year by rounding up the very best Photoshop tutorials from the year. This is always one of my favourite end of year posts. This compilation feature a great mixture of a variety of various Photoshop tutorials from text effects to photo manipulation. If you want to pick up some new Photoshop techniques look no further this is the perfect blog post, in order to learn some new Photoshop tricks.

Is there a great Photoshop tutorial missing from post ? please do share in the comments below would be much appreciated.

We’re running a Cinemagraph contest where we want you to create Cinemagraph images and we’ve got over $1,000 worth of prizes up for grabs courtesy of PayPal and Flixel!

What’s a Cinemagraph?

Cinemagraphs are still photographs in which a minor and repeated movement occurs. Cinemagraphs, typically published in an animated GIF format, can give the illusion that the viewer is watching a video.

Here are some great examples of cinemagraphs created by the pioneers of the cinemagraph format, Jamie Beck and Kevin Burg. Check out their Tumblr blog, Ann Street Studio to see much more of their amazing photography.

Much like fashion trends, web design too goes through its own phases and cycles. A trend or technique that is hot today might fall out of favor tomorrow, whereas something that was once considered ridiculous might just come back into vogue once again. Take animated GIFs for example: they were a cool thing back in the 1990s, then fell out of favor in the previous decade, and are nowadays once again popular, albeit this time they owe their existence to memes and social media comments or emojis.

One design trend, however, that is currently on the rise is parallax scrolling. More and more designers are now using parallax as a key feature of their designs and themes. While it does have its own share of awesomeness, it is not meant for every website. In other words, parallax scrolling might be many things, but it surely is not a silver bullet that fixes everything.

The Design Community Roundup

Lately I have seen a few of these so called multi-screen experiences, sites where users are able to interact with the desktop version of website using their mobile device.

With the rising popularity of mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, we will be seeing a lot more of these multi-screen experiences. I don’t think it will be something that will become popular in mainstream web development any time soon, but it’s a cool concept as far as experimental web design goes and certainly something worth exploring.

The core technology that makes this possible is the WebSocket protocol. With WebSockets you can pass messages back and forth between a desktop website and the mobile version.

When you hear the phrase “material design” it may evoke the mental image of an interior designer oscillating between choices for drapery fabric. Strangely this metaphor wouldn’t be too far off from Google’s new design specification. While there are plenty of differences between the physical and digital world Google is attempting to bridge that gap for a more relatable UI design process.

Material Design is a design language created for Google Android’s new OS which was announced in Summer 2014. Although the spec primarily focuses on touch-based mobile app design it should be possible to extrapolate the same ideas into web design. While the online documentation is quite detailed I found it to be confusing in some places. For this guide I want to lay out the more essential info to explain the purpose of Material Design and how it will affect the interface design process.

Web designers and developers within our Envato Market community, including some of our Elite authors who have sold in excess of $500,000-worth of Web templates and WordPress themes, have overwhelmingly given Adobe Brackets a huge thumbs up!

What is Brackets?

Brackets is an open source text editor created by Adobe and written in HTML, CSS, and Javascript. It’s described by Adobe as “a modern, open source text editor that understands web design.” And they’re not wrong!

In this video tutorial, GraphicRiver author Chris Honniger will show you ten professional Photoshop techniques, in only ten short minutes, for applying dramatic moods, inspiring styles and movie-like effects to your bland photography collection.

The actions Chris uses for the tutorial are not simple, filter-playing actions. The steps that they take have been thoroughly studied and fully tested, making these actions true image enhancers. The results are realistic re-creations of traditional effects, like lomo, vintage, sepia, HDR, ultraviolet, infrared, and many more. He also only uses a single image throughout the tutorial, so that he can fully illustrate the power and professional effects these techniques, coupled with his Photoshop Actions, can achieve.

This tutorial is a detailed video screen cast on how you can use Photoshop to create an animated gif. Gifs are a blast from the past in the late 90’s they where a hot trend every web designer seemed incorporate flashing gifs into there web projects, which really use to make me cringe. It’s a technique that can work really well when when used really subtly within a web project. Gifs are more commonly used these days within banners, and not as heavily used as it once was.

I hope you enjoy the tutorial please feel free to leave a comment below on your thoughts on the screen cast below.

Until recently, Phil from Philly (sorry Phil) was a one man band – designer, developer and support guru. He left work full time to focus on his best-selling WordPress Theme – Salient – a real crowd pleaser on ThemeForest with over 22,000 sales. Let’s chat with him and uncover what made him take that leap of faith as an entrepreneur!

Happy Power Elite Day ThemeNectar…

…how does it feel?

Thanks! Honestly when I started as an author here I never imagined that I’d reach this milestone – it all still feels very surreal.

Mobile devices are very popular and many web developers are getting more and more interested in app developing and design. You should know that there are many great app developing tutorials on the web, which can help you learn the basics of app developing. There are many websites which offer free tutorials, so you can learn how to create beautiful and functional Android apps.

For today, we selected 20 best free Android tutorials to maximize your skills. These great Android tutorials are also very good for beginners. Enjoy!

As responsive web design quickly evolves, more and more usable solutions and patterns are emerging to help you easily build a navigation system for your site that will work seamlessly on both mobile devices and desktops.

In this post I’m going to take a quick look at some of those solutions and also share some useful resources to help get you on your way.

A couple of months ago, Jake published an in-depth analysis on some of the latest responsive menu design trends, and he picked out some of the most popular types of navigation systems that he felt where worth taking a look at.

Hyper Cache is a simple to use caching plug-in for WordPress. I like that Hyper Cache is simple to use, and its settings page in WordPress Dashboard>Settings>Hyper Cache has a lot of features with descriptions to customize the settings of Hyper Cache for the needs of different types of blogs like news blog, hobby blogs, personal blogs and how-to tutorial blogs.